Tonight Hatem Bazian and Omar Zahzah discuss Zahzah’s new book Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle.
Omar Zahzah is the author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon
Valley, and Digital Colonialism in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle
(The Censored Press/Seven Stories Press). He is an Assistant Professor
of Arab and Muslim, Ethnicities and Diaspora (AMED) Studies in the
Department of Race and Resistance Studies (RRS) at San Francisco State
University. Zahzah holds a B.A. in Comparative World Literature and
Creative Writing from California State University, Long Beach, and an
M.A. and PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of
California, Los Angeles.
A scholar-activist of Lebanese Palestinian descent, Zahzah is the
former Education and Advocacy Coordinator of Eyewitness Palestine, a
position that saw him training delegates to Palestine on racial
justice and Palestinian political history. Previously active in
Students for Justice in Palestine and the Palestinian Youth Movement,
Omar is currently a member of US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN)
and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at San Francisco State
University.
Zahzah’s academic research focuses on how Black, Arab American and
Palestinian creatives utilize literature to resist converging projects
of securitization. In his literary criticism, Zahzah introduced the
concept of “solidarity poetics” to capture how Caribbean American
“surrealist blues” poet aja monet and Palestinian poet Mohammed
El-Kurd practice a dialogic poetry of joint struggle that undermines
globalizing colonial and carceral paradigms of racialized violence,
dispossession, and incapacitation.
Zahzah is also a self-taught journalist, and over the years has been a
recurring contributor to outlets such as The Electronic Intifada,
Mondoweiss, The Palestine Chronicle, and more. His journalism has also
appeared in outlets such as CounterPunch, InTheseTimes, and The
Nation. Zahzah’s poetry can be found in publications such as the
anthology Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry, published by
Haymarket Books in 2025, Social Text, and more.
ABOUT HATEM BAZIAN
Hatem Bazian is a Decolonial scholar who centers Islam's epistemology
in all his work and examines the contemporary world through a global
south lens. Bazian is the author of five books, numerous chapters,
peer-reviewed journal articles, and hundreds of press articles, as
well as a constant contributor to and participant in academic
discussions across the globe. Bazian is a leading scholar in the field
of Islamophobia Studies, having founded the Islamophobia Studies
Center, served as Editor-in-Chief of the Islamophobia Studies Journal,
and co-founded and currently serves as President of the International
Islamophobia Studies and Research Association (IISRA).
Bazian co-founded Zaytuna College, the 1st Accredited Muslim Liberal
Arts College in the United States. Dr. Bazian is a teaching professor
in the Departments of Middle East Languages and Cultures and Asian
American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California,
Berkeley. Dr. Bazian between 2002-2007, also served as an adjunct
professor of law at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of
California, Berkeley. At the community level, Bazian is the President
of the Northern California Islamic Council, co-founder and national
chair of American Muslims for Palestine, chairman of the Board of the
Muslim Legal Fund for America and founder board chair of the Palestine
Center for Public Policy.